Once on top of the Mur we had level going again for a space, and hurrying to the base of the crowning dome, which swells upward another thousand feet, we began its ascent without stopping. About half way up the dome the highest visible rocks of Mont Blanc on this side break through the Mur. They are called the Petits Mulets. We had nearly reached them when, looking back, I saw the heads of the other party appearing on the brink of the Mur. They looked up at us hanging right above them on the white slope, while Couttet carried my handkerchief, streaming triumphantly in the morning wind, from the end of his baton. Waving their hands, they sat down and gave up the race. While they lunched we pushed upward more slowly, and at six o'clock entered the door of Monsieur Janssen's observatory, fifteen thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven feet above the sea.
My first look was directed to the Matterhorn, which, thirty-five miles away, pierced the morning sky with its black spike. Glittering near it were the snow turrets of Monte Rosa, the Dent Blanche, and all the marvellous circle of peaks that stand around Zermatt. There was not a cloud to break the view. On one side lay Italy; on the other France. It would be impossible to imagine the wild scene immediately below us. The tremendous slopes of snow falling away on all sides, now in steep inclines and now in broken precipices, ever down and down, were not after all so imposing as the jagged pinnacles of bare rock that sprang out of them.
There was something peculiarly savage, almost menacing, in the aspect of these lower mountains, pressing in serried ranks around their white-capped chief. They seemed to shut us far away from the human world below, and one felt that he had placed himself entirely in the hands of nature. This was her realm, where she acknowledged no laws but her own, and was incapable of sympathy, pity, or remorse.
Author of "The Coupons of Fortune," "Henry," and other stories.
When Mr. William Belden walked out of his house one wet October evening and closed the hall door carefully behind him, he had no idea that he was closing the door on all the habits of his maturer life and entering the borders of a land as far removed from his hopes or his imagination as the country of the Gadarenes.